


Dry Soil at the Scent of Water

by thegildedmagpie



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: (mild), (sort of), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Bestiality, Body Horror, Collars, Dubious Consent, F/M, Gen, M/M, Master/Pet, Pack Dynamics, Rape/Non-con Elements, Stream of Consciousness, Torture, Werewolves, lupine preoccupation with smells and with peeing on things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-13
Updated: 2016-04-13
Packaged: 2018-06-02 02:03:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,261
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6545968
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thegildedmagpie/pseuds/thegildedmagpie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Finrod dies at Tol-in-Gaurhoth, but Gorthaur the cruel Necromancer isn’t done with him just yet - and the fall of the Isle of Werewolves doesn’t mean his lupine breeding project is over. </p><p>Yes, I actually wrote the long-threatened werewolf!Finrod fic.  Not quite as dark as it sounds.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dry Soil at the Scent of Water

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to [Siadea](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Siadea) for a super-speedy beta read. Dedicated to [Elfbones](http://archiveofourown.org/users/elfbones/pseuds/elfbones) and [Flamingflamingos](http://archiveofourown.org/users/baradduh/pseuds/flamingflamingos) for various forms of dark Silmarillion inspiration.
> 
> Also, credit to my live models for canine behavior, who are a chihuahua/schipperke mix and a boxer/hound mix, which probably explains something.

There's a scent of wool and warmth and thereness that he's looking for. _Mother_ , he thinks without words, and _Bëor_. That one's half word and half seeking whine, for the feelings that come with the thought are many and much, and he hears himself whimper it hurting. No milk-smell but steel and comfort and a beating heart. But neither is right, and the scent he wanted, the scent that was comfort-in-pain and something-solid, is around him, but it is stronger than it should be and weaker too, and he whimpers again, afraid.

A finger drags across his back. It feels good and he lengthens to it. “Hush, little treasure,” says a voice that laughs. “Peace, my little killer, you will learn to see the world differently now; and then you will have new categories of things to cry over. Can you see much? Is it flat like a tapestry, your new little world? One day, perhaps, you'll be able to tell me. But I think … not.”

He understands the words. He does not understand the words. He has no words of his own. He understands the pad of finger on his tiny tongue, careless of his sharpness little milkteeth for he will not dare bite. He suckles a little. He can taste the ridges of the finger-print on his tongue. They taste of lightning and they taste of no more words.

He cannot stop crying for the scent that was something solid in a realm made of the clinking of chains. He cannot stop crying for the words. The voice laughs and it is a comfort when it does. It is a comfort, too, that there is no smell of wave-salt and blood-salt. He smelled that long ago, did he not? He has been smelling it since, smelling it ever, smelling it always.

*

There was a pale wolf-pup in a jeweled collar that was too big for it. Its eyes were not quite open and it was made of eiderdown. It lay in the sleeve of the one that he cannot now name, for it is not the intent of that one to be named.

When he knelt on the stones, the one who forced him to cower bade him say Master. The one bade him so as he made him scream unmarked and when he listened to the jaws rending wetly in cared-for flesh, when the chains rubbed through his wrists and he shook silently against his love's son's son, he could feel the one's mind pressing against his own, urging him to become what would say it. When the whips came and the knives, the one asked him to say it and offered to stop if he would. He was not inexperienced with the sort of thing that the one did to him then, but it was brutal enough that he screamed at the ripping forceful inward. That was still better than later, when he was already crying far past shame and the one was gentle with him, holding raw wrists in the single hand that had shattered his harp, teasing him to say it even as the one bound his spirit tighter to a body that was forgetting how to heal.

He remembers knowing that what was happening to him was changing the shape of his fëa, was making it harder and harder still to remember what he should be shaped like. But he did not truly understand why until he saw the one feeding pale and pinkred strips of his torn-away skin to the hungry red mouth of the pale little wolf pup, saw it swallowing past the ornately jeweled little collar, so hungry.

Now he can only think of the one as Master, but he cannot say it. While his spirit has been wrought into a shape that submits, Master will never hear himself called so; the soul obeys, but the tongue won a little victory.

*

The cold air that hurts his nose is up high and it rushes nightward. He does not look. His vision cannot comprehend mountains so small. One eye sees blood and the other sees a distant map with no contours. There's a moment where white stone flashes farnear and he smells something wet; his nose pokes out of the cloak where he's kept like something precious, a bloodstained bundle of yellowwhite fur against Master's chest, and past the dripping blood bright as gold-over-copper he catches a bit of dew that makes him think, waves caves tumble tide friend lord, but it's gone in an instant and the acrid stench of a darkland replaces it.

Slightly squashed in the pocket where he's been kept from since before, half-red with blood and damp with nervousness, he shrinks into the leathery cloak of Master.

The darkland smell is there before he can make water and blood into a bite of memory, and he is glad of it. Anyway, there was not so much salt, and the rushing air did not pulse like a grieving heart. For the most part these are good things.

*

Wolves dream. They chase and call in their sleep. Chasing and calling among them, he sees dreaming people he knows. There is a man who smells of milk-smell and pillow and safe who holds him and weeps. There is a woman who stands afar and will not touch him, but by the time he has outgrown too much to fit into her sleeve, she is picking him up and fitting him there. Both their hair is golden. He remembers the sight of the same golden lying eddy-feathered around his broken hands.

They come less often in the darkland, and they are shepherded when they come by one who smells of lightning and of flowers and who he cowers from. Eventually they do not come. He misses them, but he likes his dreams of rabbits to chase too.

Even in ordinary wolfwalk dreams, there are beautiful things enough that he does not need to think about the loss of that smell he sought, or the memory of the salt-blood-wave smell.

*

A certain frailty had been his guardian once. He had looked like a feather set afire which could drift on the wind. But fire can burn an unwary paw. And pale, wan fire is enough to drive most people where the feather should wish; a bright blaze is only needed for the strongest spirits to bow.

“You were impossible to satisfy,” says Master, in the soft tender-gentle-with-the-pup voice that is not truly kind, and he does not know if Master speaks of him or of himself.

Tiny pup he is and then small, skinny juvenile with soft and silky golden fur and too much toes, but no one will now think he is frail long enough for him to surprise them.

*

In the darkland he is happy again. Some of the wolves are justwolves, and they fascinate and delight him; they are simple and more than meat and they run, run, run for pleasure and he runs with them, always so gentle when they gnaw upon his legs and he tugs their ears back. When Master bids him to savage one, he does as he is told, for something in his spirit makes him bend; but afterward he sits up on his haunches and cries. Long and loud he laments, a shrill howl gaining fullness until the stones shake. It is right to sing for the dead. He knows it, knows from before. On Master's face he sees something afraid like a hooded hawk of afraid on his shoulder.

Other wolves are like him; they are not justwolves. Some of them have words. One of them, a big silver female, her teats rosy from many litters, says words to him and mocks his silence, but the mockery feels good and he plumes his tail high and play-bows to her, elegant forelegs stretching out as his sharp claws spread. She smells like the hunt-joy and he did not know it was a smell he knew from before, but it says before to him, and so do her bright, fey eyes and her silvery color. He cannot look into her eyes when he mounts her, but he can when they share their meat. He brings her some and she brings him an equal portion and she sings a little whining-song in her throat to him when he licks the fullness of her nipples. The justwolves do not like that, but she does, and he is sorry when she goes touch-shy and meat-wary and begins to preserve her udder for the next litter. “You are not much bigger,” she tells him when they are born and he comes to sniff them. (It is not true, though he is not so big as she is.) She lets him lick the pups clean with her. He loves them and he hopes that Master will let him keep them, but he is bursting-river-proud when they grow half-big and deep-chested and strong and go to Master's hunt. He mourns with her for the pups and they sing sad and proud together.

“Should I, pup, would I, pup, silent pup,” she croons to him, and he sings back to her because she likes it when he is not silent. He can harmonize so their voices please the ear, though his tongue will not form speech like hers will; but his tongue is clever and they can sing together in ways that the justwolves do not care about but the others like to hear.

*

Master is fitting his collar again. He does not like it. He knows better than to resist when he is called from the tumble of the pack, though. He crawls to Master like a good dog, feeling his genitals dragging on the floor as he does the obeisance his nature demands of him. It pleases master to see him crawl low and it does him no harm, for he is outside the pack's peculiar off-bred hierarchy of justwolves and speakwolves. It is not lonely to be outside, and it means that he can please Master enough that there is less bored; bored means pain for the pack altogether. If there is more inside and stay and the hard knot hurting under his tail, that is not so bad.

The collar is glorious even to the flat of his eyes, with blue and green stones bright as spring outside the darkland, and he holds still while Master secures it, though he cannot help but whine as rivets screech and thunder until the collar is in place. Master tucks his fluff beneath the ring of gold and checks the fit with two fingers. “You are nearly grown,” he says. “I do not think I will have to make another.” Master is pleased and proud. Master has the voice of seeing bloodflow become inevitable.

His tail wants to sway and shiver, but he makes the shiver travel up his spine and stretches at Master's feet instead.

*

There comes a day when the world smells of sleep, and there is a sound above that thrums and throbs just below hearing. The pack is lying about between romps, meatless sated in loose piles. At the sound, some of the wolves put their heads up and their ears up, and some of them put their heads down on their paws and shudder into slumber.

On the air there is some scent of blood-in-water, and there is some scent of lightning and sweet flowers, and there is some scent of something else. Promises, perhaps, or trickery, or pure rivers.

“Don't,” says his silver friend in her halfsleep. “Don't.” He does though and breaks into a trot as he finds the stairs. The wolves stay at the bottom of the stairs. He goes up. There is a sound.

Some of the others follow him as he explores, weaving a wolf-way through the honeycomb rooms that are black like mad and poisoned bees would make, his claws ringing on the stones with a scraping tick that is sharper than the blunt click of the justwolves' nails, even the biggest and most vicious of them. He gets lost once and they pause to sniff each other, circling and smelling to see if each other really mean to explore.

The heart of the lightningflower smell is the throne room, and there are sleeping people all around. Even Master's favorite wolves, the ones fully grown and ready to be at Master's side as he is soon to be (though none wear a collar like his) are sleeping, soft wolfsnores and banked fires and great sprawling hugenesses.

He circles sniffing industriously as the others fan out around him to sniff in their own circles. A few of them approach Master where he lies beside the throne, but when he stirs, they all turn tail and flit-flee the room.

The sound is gone, but smells stay. The lightningflowers and the dew of night draw him out, and the movement of the air calls him out, and Master's voice does not call him back even when they are cradled in the claws of the bridge to out.

It smells of crazed fear here, and he instinctively urinates to cover the smell of mine and hurt and incomprehension and mine again. So do many of the others; some, though, turn back and disappear, slinking cowed back to the place where Master deems that wolves should be. There is blood here. He feels his shoulders become a ridge and his neck become a slope and his feet become a long prowl. There is blood, and there is the lightningflower smell, and there is the furry, earthy cowermaking smell of Carcharoth.

He is not the only one who has appeased Carcharoth with light nips to his jaw, with rolling on his back and showing his throat. Carcharoth is second only to Master in ability to deliver pain.

There is so much outside. He raises his head and tests the air and looks around and above in a way he has not done in a long time.

There was the place with the water smell that Master did not see, and it may not smell of blood now. He could try to find that place. He could turn inside and go back where he belongs and wait to have his collar fitted again, one day be at Master's side and eat of manflesh from Master's hand. He has learned to look forward to this. If Master were wakeful, he knows his will would not stand up to Master's and he would return wherever Master wishes him to be. So he was made.

But there's a smell of light he's coming to know here among this welter of corrupting smells.

And there is so _much_ outside.

He goes in the opposite direction from Carcharoth's scent, breaking into a run once he's past the bridge. Many of the justwolves follow. 

*

The pack runs.

There is a world outside the darkland still. It is beautiful. He can catch fish and toss them in the air and catch them again and sometimes he can do it many times before they die or get away or become too tasty to throw. Their blood in the stream does not smell like blood-in-waves and it is good to lap up and good to send downstream. There is no one out here to covet his golden collar, though he enjoys the sparkle of the gems and will lie on his back in angled light to watch the facets send back sky onto the trees. He cocks his leg against rocks that are shaped like towers and he dreams of the golden-haired man who calls himself father again and he wakes to wrestle with wolves bigger than he and surrender laughing in their faces, so no one wins, and that is good. His collar is tighter but not so tight that he can't lick himself, which is one of his particular daily pleasures; it is more comfortable, though, to roll on his back and let one of the others rut against him, dark fur against his flaxen gold.

None of the speakwolves came with them, and he finds himself the leader of the pack, for he can slink about and seem puppyish and friendly until the watchfulness that answers threat emerges and his ears come forward and the corners of his mouth go tight, and none challenge him then. He is bigger than the others and his claws are sharper, better fit for catching and tearing prey and for dragging down a tree for the pleasure of licking and sniffing the sweet sap inside. He remembers how to tell sweet treeblood from bitter resin by the texture of the bark, once seen, now felt with the tip of his nose, and his paw-pads grow used to rocktwigs and earth instead of wet scrubbed stone when Master had been in, stone and foulsoil when he had not.

Once he finds a tree someone else has cut, near the friendly rivergrowl. It is a sharp-resin tree and not a sweet one, though he licks around the splinters anyway for the fun of taste. But on the stone beside it there is a scent he once looked to smell again.

He runs, and the pack follows. They ford over shallow stones that turn yelpingly beneath a paw and they run, deep to the heart of the green pad of land in the humming river. But he flattens like a skin upon the floor when he sees it. A den – a house – a place half-built, made from sharp-resin trees and some sweet. There is lightningflower smell here in the bath of its evening dew, but it's softer now and less like Master's and less like she who came in his dreams, more like the silken wing of hair over someone's eyes. There's a steel-and-wool-and-warm-smelling man. The man does not look familiar to these eyes but the scent, the man's scent is one he was looking for as soon as he had a nose again. It is so like the home-scent that he still whines for in the night.

There's the home-smelling man and a lightningflower woman and a soft little lightningflower child in her arms.

He does not have words to warn the pack to stay, nor to order them to stay as Master would, but with the justwolves he does not need words. They wait, low in the foliage around the half-den of cut trees, and he steps into the clearing. Long and pale and golden he steps, high on long legs, then sinking to his deep chest and letting his narrow hipbones power his crawl forward. He could stay back with the justwolves and melt away. But he does not. He lets his tail shiver, then wag, ingratiating and friendly as he waits for the man and the woman and the tiny new pupchild to see him, to see his fur ruffled by the soft breeze or his jeweled collar flashing in the light.

He hopes he will not need words for this, for if he needs them, he will not have them. (He remembers, faintly, one-like-him who had words only when he needed them – or so the silver friend before his silver she-friend said. He does not think he will be granted that gift.)

He will risk needing words, risk not having them and dying for their lack that Master took from him, if it is a matter of needing words, or of having someone to sing for.

He hopes he will not need words now.


End file.
